Special Focus Facility

The New York Times had an article about “Special Focus Facilities”. Special Focus Facilities are the worse of the worse nursing homes. “Special focus facility status is reserved for the poorest-performing facilities out of more than 15,000 skilled nursing homes. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., assign each state a set number of slots, roughly based on the number of nursing homes. Then state health regulators pick which nursing homes to include.”

Designation requires the facility to immediately fix violations in care while under increased inspections or be stripped of federal funding by Medicare and Medicaid — a financial deprivation few homes can survive.

“While special focus status is one of the federal government’s strictest forms of oversight, nursing homes that were forced to undergo such scrutiny often slide back into providing dangerous care, according to an analysis of federal health inspection data. Of 528 nursing homes that graduated from special focus status before 2014 and are still operating, slightly more than half — 52 percent — have since harmed patients or put patients in serious jeopardy within the past three years.”

Yet, despite recurrences of patient harm, nursing homes are rarely denied Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. Regulators rarely return homes to the watch list, instead issuing fines for subsequent lapses. Some homes continue operating despite multiple penalties. Especially troubling is that more than a third of operating nursing facilities that graduated from the watch list before 2014 still hold the lowest possible Medicare rating for health and safety: one star of five, the analysis found.

More than 900 facilities have been placed on the watch list since 2005. But the number of nursing homes under special focus at any given time has dropped by nearly half since 2012, because of federal budget cuts. This year, the $2.6 million budget allows only 88 nursing homes to receive the designation, though regulators identified 435 as warranting scrutiny. Too few nurses, particularly registered nurses, provide care at some of the most troubled homes, the analysis shows.